An anonymous reader writes: Over the years, Slashdot has recycled plenty of articles about lousy UX, lousy design, lousy graceful degradation, lousy development practices, lousy community management, even lousy JavaScript implementations creating security problems. Did Slashdot read any of those articles?

Imagine a world where after 3 years the applications can't even run on your old system and you have to replace it to get new applications.

As a Mac user, I have to say that I don't need to imagine very hard.

Most users upgrade to a new version of OS X within the first month or so. App developers target the new version pretty much from the start, with old OS versions becoming unsupported fairly quickly.

And Apple's not afraid to cut off old hardware with a new OS X release, in order to avoid having to keep a load of legacy support code around. You generally get a bit longer than 3 years, though; 5 or 6 is more like it. And once you're cut off from new OS X versions, you're cut off from new versions of a lot of other software.

Unless you're logged in with the "Disable ads" box checked and you also checked the "Post anonymously" box, of course:)

As for content providers having the right to display on my computer when I request their site: when I go to example.com, I'm requesting content from example.com. If that page has an include from doubleclick.net, I'm not the one requesting doubleclick.net — example.com is. They have no right to agree to that on my behalf, and I'm quite happy to take whatever action is necessary to enforce that.

Your last two paragraphs get to the point of the whole matter, of course: somebody who's deliberately blocking ads is not going to sit there and view them rather than look at a blank page — they're going to go somewhere else.

Perhaps if a large number of sites start requiring ads we'll see something like the piracy scene, where someone downloads the page with ads, copies the actual content out of it, and republishes that somewhere on the darker side of the net.

Dangerous_Minds writes: GIMP, a free and open source altenernative to image manipulation software like Photoshop, recently announced that it will no longer be distributing their program through SourceForge. Citing some of the ads as reasons, they say that the tipping point was "the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge." The policy changes were reported back in August by Gluster. GIMP is now distributing their software via their own FTP page instead. Is Sourceforge becoming the next CNET?Link to Original Source